


Missing Her

by Caoten



Series: Forbidden [2]
Category: Hiveswap, Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, F/F, Humanstuck, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Mental Health Issues, Slow Burn, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Suburban Mothers, lol
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-06
Updated: 2019-09-26
Packaged: 2019-10-23 12:06:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 16,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17683118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Caoten/pseuds/Caoten
Summary: (This is Part 2 of a series, and I’d recommend reading Part 1 (8,461 words) before reading Part 2. There will be a Part 3!)Even when love fails, life goes on.Rose Lalonde and Kanaya Maryam parted ways almost fifteen years ago, and since then, neither of their lives have stopped to wait for them. Yet, their stories didn’t turn out to be so different from one another, after all. Healing their wounds, settling down, moving to the suburbs; it’s all part of life...Inspired by a soulmate AU where your eyes glow when your soulmate is thinking about you: http://lgbtqwritingprompts.tumblr.com/post/180651057245/a-soulmate-au-where-a-persons-eyes-glow-when





	1. Time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 15 years can change a lot.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you’re here from Her Eyes, yooo thanks for keeping on reading! And if you’re new, yooo yo!
> 
> This chapter is a bit angstier than previous (and future) ones. Content Warnings include: Mental illness and all that might follow.

She has pulled her apron over her head, and it hangs neatly on her hook on the kitchen wall. It was her idea, that everyone should have their own, designated hook in every room where one might need to hang a towel, a hand towel, or any kind of cloth or clothing.

For her birthday—by this time, probably five years ago—you hand-painted her small, ceramic signs with your names on to hang above your personal towel hooks, so that the risk of mix-ups would be minimised.

She was very happy with the gift, so happy that you continued to paint and knit small, simple things to make your shared household more neatly organised and easily navigated. Even when it wasn’t her birthday, but just those days when you wanted to put a smile on her soft lips, so that her cheeks would puff up and tint to pink. Or when you wanted to apologise.

Because your wife’s almost bureaucratic need for order and almost maniacal pedantry turned out to not work so well with your, well, maniacal  _ mania. _

Thus, she isn’t so happy any longer.

With her hands sternly placed on her wide hips, Jane, your wife of almost ten years, glares at you, and you hate her for what is coming. She opens her mouth, and her voice is a loud, sizzling whisper:

“You promised me that you’d try harder after last time, Rose.” She throws an eye of frustrated worry up at the ceiling, where your son’s room is. Not more than a minute earlier, his door slammed shut, and the lock clicked, almost echoing in the silence he left in the kitchen. “You promised me, and you promised Dr. Paint that you’d try for Dirk,” Jane continues, and even though you know that she’s trying to be angry, her eyes are glistening. And she’s not an angry cryer.

“Jane, I cannot emphasise enough how much I literally do not care what Dr. Paint thinks!” you spit, but you don’t know why you are so angry. You barely even remember why Dirk left the kitchen. “And I don’t care what any of you think, either! You always put yourself before everyone else!” When she doesn’t say anything, your mouth rushes to fill the silence: “I’m happy, Jane! Why won’t any of you simply let me be happy! You are my  _ family, _ for Christ’s sake!”

“But you  _ aren’t  _ happy, Rose!” Jane cries, and you can hear that she is forcing herself not to yell or break into tears. “You’re not happy. You’re sick!”

None of you were ever the visibly emotional person, but right now, unlike your wife, you have no issue yelling. “I’m telling you, I am _not_ _sick!_ That is just what that doctor has forced into your brain so you won’t feel bad for having this huge trunk up your ass!”

“Don’t call her ‘that doctor’, Rose. She’s your friend. She’s both of our friend.” Jane lifts her hands to emphasise her words with air quotations, but looking into your wild, grey eyes, she lets her hands fall down along her sides again, and frustrated, she crosses her arms over her chest. “And don’t be obscene. Dirk can hear us. You know he can.”

You throw out with your hands. “Good! Let him know who  _ really _ is the crazy one of his mothers!”

“Rose, I didn’t mean-”

“I was talking about you, bitch!”

You cannot remember why you are fighting, just that you are so incredibly full of rage. The past minutes have passed in a blur, if not hours. Or days. You don’t remember, everything is going too fast.

All you know is that something in your chest is writhing and jerking, an impossibly strong serpent squeezing your heart and your lungs and your throat. It is that force again, inside of you. It’s been creeping on you, biding its time, but now it has finally returned once again.

And looking at your wife’s face, Jane’s so familiar cheeks and brows and forming wrinkles, you could strangle her. She looks disappointed, she looks worried, but she also looks sad. Sorrowful. And you hate it. And you hate your house and your son and you hate his stupid school and Jane’s family and you hate that Dave hasn’t called you in so long and that neither has your mother.

You could really use a call from your mother.

Instead, you shout: “You and Dr. Paint can die for all I care! I’m leaving, Jane! Okay? I’m leaving!” The fact that Jane doesn’t do anything, that she doesn’t yell back or cry or try to stop you, it makes you so much madder. “Don’t follow me. And fucking apologise to Dirk!”

And so you leave your wife behind, standing completely still in the middle of your living-room, just staring after you with empty eyes.

You slam the door behind you, and you can barely see through your heaving breaths. Everything is passing by you so fast and you cannot focus when your thoughts speed up even more. It’s a waltz you both know all too well, what has transpired this night, and you have danced it so many times before.

You turn on the ignition of your car, and you drive out into the dark night. You forgot to wear a jacket.

 

* * *

 

You leave the faucet running as you chop the onions for tonight’s dinner with your sharp, newly purchased knife. Aranea doesn’t believe that it helps against crying, but you are certain that something in the pouring water cleans the air from the chemicals.

Whenever your wife enters the kitchen while you have the faucet running, she scrunches up her nose in dislike. But you can usually finish the argument before it has even begun by reminding her of who of you it is who has a doctor’s degree in biology. Not that being a biology lector at a community college actually has much to do with knowing the chemical components of onions. But she doesn’t need to know that.

Behind you, you hear someone enter the kitchen, but you don’t feel a need to turn around to confirm who it is. Instead, you simply continue to prepare the food, quietly humming a soft melody.

“Hey,” Dammek says from the entryway.

You knew it was Dammek anyway, before he spoke. Xefros is much lighter on his feet than your foster son is, and Aranea refuses to remove her high-heels even indoors.

“Hello, Dammek,” you say. You reach out and cut off a slice of one of the apples that are supposed to soon go in your curry, and turn around to hand it to him. “Are you doing well?”

Dammek—your ‘part-time-son’, as you and Aranea often refer to him as—is leaning against the wall behind you, and chews on the apple piece that you handed him. He, just like your wife, made it abundantly clear as soon as the first time that he lived with you and your family that he would  _ not _ remove his combat boots inside the house. Not for anything in the world. The hand that isn’t holding the half-eaten apple slice is deeply buried in the pocket of his black, too-big hoodie.

He swallows the last bite. “I guess,” he shrugs.

You hand him another slice. “But?”

He glares at you, but retreats and accepts the second apple piece. “Aranea, again,” he says, but sighs exasperatingly when you throw him a glance over your shoulder for him to continue. “She was going through my shit- my  _ things, _ ” he corrects himself. “She doesn’t fucki- she doesn’t trust me to have my own room, apparently.” You hear him angrily chew on his apple piece, and then swallow. You hand him another one. “And she thinks I’m a ‘bad influence’ on ‘her son’.” You can hear his air quotations even without looking at him.

“Did she say that?” you ask. You really, really hope she didn’t, but you wouldn’t put it past her.

You hear him leaning his head back against the wall with a low thud. “No… But it’s like, so  _ fucking  _ obvious, man.” He’s quiet for a second. “Sorry.”

“I will let it slide.”

He walks up and stands beside you, and you hand him the knife.

It was Aranea’s idea to begin with, to take in a foster child, but you have your suspicions that it was always more about her than it was about the child. And when that child turned out to be  _ difficult _ , as the lady at the foster care centre described Dammek when you and your wife was there to sign the papers three years ago, Aranea hadn’t been too happy. One night, when you were lying together in bed, she had told you that she’d ‘tame’ him. ‘Taming’ him, in Aranea’s eyes, meant holding hour-long lectures about good behaviour and etiquette, as well as how he should be thankful for having a home. In the end, it only served to embarrass him and push him further away from her.

_ You  _ found that all it took was to listen to his music and ask him to help you cook dinner once in a while.

You wash your hands as he continues, chopping the vegetables and fruits quickly with fine precision. “She said she doesn’t want Xefros rapping on our tracks, and that I ‘suck the air out of the rooms I’m in’. And she doesn’t like the vest I gave him for his birthday, the leather one with our logo, you know? But I think it’s because  _ I _ gave it to him.” He chops down hard on an apple at the last word and throws the twig down into the drain. You pick it up and put it in the compost bag. “She treats me like a criminal, Kanaya.”

You have tried to explain to your wife that Dammek is just a normal teenager, and that he doesn’t need  _ more _ punishing and lecturing than Xefros does. But you, too, know what Dammek means. It is impossible to convince Aranea of anything that she doesn’t already agree with, and she must always have the last word in any and every discussion. Her fierceness was attractive in the beginning of your relationship, but when you adopted Xefros and became parents, that quality of hers became draining. And when Dammek came into the picture, it became problematic.

“I am sorry, Dammek. I will talk to her about it tonight.”

He looks up at you, but then looks back down at the plastic cutting board again and continues to chop, hiding his face behind the dark hair that is falling down in front of it. “Thanks.”

The two of you proceed to cook together in silence, only the water of the faucet resounding in the kitchen. Of course you must talk to Aranea about it, but you are in no way looking forward to it. You already know that it will lead to nothing.

 

* * *

 

The serpent in your chest hasn’t diminished its crushing movements, but instead of its previous fatal rage, it is strangling your heart and windpipe, and you can barely breathe through your shaking sobs.

You know that you are tearing your family apart, no one needs to tell you that. You know that you are hurting Jane, and you know that you are ruining Dirk’s childhood. A wail escapes you when you remember your son, whom you love so deeply and so much.

You slow down and make a turn into an empty slot alongside the country road, leading into a forest. You put your car in ‘park’, and with a trembling sigh, you throw yourself out of the driver seat door. You just need some air.

Stumbling through the darkness, the ground uneven with rocks and holes, you feel like a blind person. You fall down to your knees, and desperately hold onto your body to not disperse in the wind.

You are so scared, because you cannot control what is happening to you. Ever since your first episode, your life has been a never-ending freefall, and you don’t know how to stop and you don’t know what will happen when you finally reach the ground. You are nearing the age that Dirk’s namesake was when  _ he  _ reached the ground, when Dave had to move in with you and your mom. And that Dirk carries the same genes that you and Dave and your mom and your uncle all have and had, you cannot bear the thought.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, everyone! The format of this fic will be a little different, since I have to balance two POVs instead of just one! But I hope it’ll work well… Also, I don’t think it’ll get darker than this. Only love from now on, lads (almost).


	2. Her Family

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s a wonder they haven’t met before.

Becoming a mother was never a goal of yours. The way a child could come to shape your life in a direction that you hadn’t consented to was frightening, and nothing you ever seeked in your youth. Yet, you woke up one day, nervous and nauseous, but prepared to tell your girlfriend that you were expecting.

A little less than nine months later, Dirk was born, and you and Jane have stayed together ever since. Thankfully, she was much more equipped to care for a child than you were.

Then, everything that usually follows followed. Jane’s grandmother passed away, and Jane, as the heiress, took over her rather successful company.

You haven’t told Jane, but you are glad that things transpired as they did, otherwise you aren’t sure where she, you, and Dirk would be now, economically. Your arts & crafts online shop doesn’t pay very well.

You moved to a smaller, more suburban area, because Jane said that a child should have a house and a yard to grow up in. You got married. you bought a cat, the cat died, you enrolled Dirk in kindergarten and then in school, you bought an Xbox for him, you drove him to friends’ houses and to his kendo practises, you yelled at him, you hugged him, you stopped driving him to instead let him ride the school bus with his friends.

And you did none of it for you.

Now, you are all packed into the car, ready to go; Jane sits behind the wheel as your family’s close-to-permanently designated driver, you sit next to her in the front passenger seat, and Dirk sits behind Jane.

One of the many things that come with parenthood: attending school events such as ‘open house’ with your child, and to pleasantly converse with all the teachers and other parents. Pretend like you don’t see that the other parents smile a bit wider at you and your wife.

It’s Dirk’s first year in middle school, thus hundreds of new parents whom you must tell that ‘Yes, your child is in the same class as a boy with  _ lesbian parents’ _ . You are the boogeyman no one wants to talk about.

 

You barely notice the sensation that starts at the base of your skull, then travels to warm up your face. You haven’t felt it in years, and when you have, it has been by a trick of your mind as you lie asleep, dreaming.

But the feeling is unmistakably there, and out of an old habit that you didn’t even remember that you had, you start searching through your purse for your round sunglasses.

Of course you didn’t bring them. It has been almost fifteen years since you last met Kanaya Maryam.

You feel your pulse race, and, panicked, you cover your mouth and nose with your hands, serving no real purpose as you try to hide at least some part of your face. The other parents cannot see you like this. You turn around wildly to see if anyone has noticed you, and that is when you see her.

Your hands fall back down to your sides.

A romantic would say that she hasn’t aged a day, but of course she has. She must have just passed forty, and it shows. Her jet black hair is greying and it looks rougher than what it does in the unchanged image that you have of her in your mind, and her lips are surrounded by soft wrinkles, framing her mouth into a constant smile.

And she is the most beautiful woman you have ever seen.

She caught sight of you first, and when you see her, she stands frozen in the middle of the school hallway, children and adults passing by her in a constant stream. Her green eyes and your purple meeting there in front of everyone else, the situation is so familiar.

The shock doesn’t allow you to move, and meeting eyes with her again now, it feels just like that one fateful moment so many years ago, when you sat alone in her classroom. How many hours have you not spent thinking about what would have happened if she hadn’t reached out for your glasses, or where you would be now if you had been able to move before she ran out of the room?

But you aren’t an infatuated teenager anymore, and she isn’t your teacher. You are married, you have a son whom you love, and there, standing next to her, you can see that the same is true for her. A tight-lipped woman with thick-framed glasses, a lanky teenage boy wearing sunglasses, and a chubbier boy, who is maybe two years older than Dirk, wearing a leather vest with ripped sleeves.

You wonder what your family looks like to her.

Your heart stops when you see that she begins to raise her hand, and you almost yell for her to stop, but before she has lifted it higher than her stomach, the lanky teenager bumps into her shoulder and whispers something to her. Transfixed, you see that he must repeat himself at least two times before she snaps out of her trance. She flutters her eyes in that same way she did when you were alone in her classroom, and then she follows her family as they continue to walk through the hallway.

Before she goes, she throws you one last, furtive glance over her shoulder.

 

You don’t see Ms. Maryam or her family anymore during the whole evening, but the memory of your so brief encounter burns clear inside your skull. And you know that your eyes are shining, glowing that clear purple that Jane has never seen.

Because of what happened, that you’d be so unfortunate to run into your long gone soulmate together with your whole family at your son’s new school of all places, your eyes don’t stop glowing. Because just like you cannot help but think of Ms. Maryam, of everything you know of her from before, what you have just seen, and what you do not know anymore, in the very same way she seems unable to erase  _ you _ from  _ her  _ thoughts.

And when you again meet eyes with your wife, you can see your eyes’ purple reflection in her pearly greys.

She doesn’t say anything about it, and it hurts you more than any argument could have. She doesn’t know anything about your past. It never felt important to tell her that you know your soulmate, that you missed her for a long while even during the early stages of your marriage.

Jane is walking on eggshells around you, because you just recovered from your last episode. She always feels guilt after you have returned to your senses, because of the harsh things she’s said and done to try to snap you out of it. Ironically, it’s the same way  _ you _ always felt around your mother, when you were growing up alone with  _ her _ .

 

* * *

 

Vriska is out of the country, travelling with her queer-centric sports organisation, thus, you cannot call her. But you really,  _ really _ need to. You try to, but you cannot reach her before Aranea and your boys arrive at the car.

You are so scared, and your heart stops when Aranea looks at you, with a pleasant smile that slowly fades away when she meets your eyes.

“Aranea-”

“Get in the car, boys,” she cuts, and Dammek and Xefros crawl into the backseat as they’re told, Xefros opting to sit in the middle seat even though they are just two. You hear Dammek grunt at the cramped space, but then ease up against Xefros when they have their seatbelts on.

Aranea slams the door shut, locking the boys’ ears away from what will transpire between their mothers, and she pierces you with her eyes.

“Who is it? Because it isn’t me.” Her voice is like ice.

“Aranea, I cannot help if my-” you beg.

She raises a finger, shushing you. “I said,” she pauses, “who is it?”

Your mind sifts through the options that you can think of there on the spot, faced with your furious and jealous wife. Telling her the truth seems impossible. It took you so many years to wash yourself clean of how disgusting it made you feel, that Rose Lalonde, your  _ student _ , was your soulmate. But lying to your legal wife, denying who it is that has made your eyes show their true colours at last; it feels like admitting to yourself that your and Rose Lalonde’s story isn’t over yet.

“Just a stranger,” you finally say, and your heart sinks. “I don’t even know her name.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, y’all! Kudos and comments etc are always super, super appreciated!!


	3. Keeping Distance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lady Fate has other plans.

Twenty minutes.

Just twenty minutes. During all these years, that is how long it would have taken you to drive to Kanaya Maryam’s doorstep. But the universe had other plans. You parted ways more than a decade ago, and since then, everything has aligned in such a way that you never met again. The house that you moved into with Jane and the house that Ms. Maryam moved into with her wife and sons; just far enough apart to not share community meetings and special price supermarkets. Your children the exact ages to never be put in the same classes or sports groups.

You still have troubles referring to her in any other way than ‘Ms. Maryam’. One late night after the school open house, you lie awake next to your sleeping wife, tasting your soulmate’s new name on your tongue and lips. You have another room with a bed in the house, just so you don’t disturb Jane’s sleep when you glide in and out of episodes, submerging into insomnia, but when you have recovered from an episode, you and she make sure to sleep together to ‘reconnect’. But so, you lie there, eyes wide staring out into the dark night as you whisper those new names you weren’t supposed to use before:  _ Mrs.. Kanaya. Kanaya Maryam. Honey. _

You had no intention of meeting her again, at least not what you were consciously aware of, but of course, just like you already realised when you were but sixteen years old, it’s impossible to escape the fate that the universe has laid out for you.

 

It happens when you have driven Dirk to his kendo practise, and, because of your lately occupied, busy mind, you take a wrong turn on your way back home. You cruise the suburban streets and neighbourhoods mindlessly, and that is how you learn where she lives with her family.

Through the spacious windows of a mint blue house, you see her tall, slender shadow washing dishes together with her oldest son. It looks like they’re standing there together in silence, but the house is too far away for you to see and accurately make out their faces. Two bikes lie strewn haphazardly on the grass lawn, and the driveway is empty.

_ Just one minute _ , you tell yourself, as you put your car in park by the opposite side of the street. Repressing the sticky feeling of being a creep, you watch her move inside her house, towel-drying plates and glasses and opening cupboards with a grace that makes your head feel light.

There isn’t yet enough research on the subject or accurate enough measuring devices to know exactly how soulbonding works, but most psychologists agree that once two people’s eyes have met and shifted colour together, the two minds instantly form an unbreakable, lifelong bond. Then, the different schools of psychology disagree, but the psychodynamic school states that every decision from then on out is the subconscious fighting to make one reunite with one’s soulmate.

Watching Ms. Maryam makes you dizzy, so you, as quietly as possible, step out of the car, and with every movement your mind screams for you to get back inside and drive home to your wife and son.

“Just one minute,” you mumble again, trying to silence your nerves. Your brain just needs some oxygen.

The evening is quiet, the only sounds being a few cicadas hiding in nearby flower beds and one house’s watering system pendling over their lawn. It’s past 7:30 PM, and thusly, in accordance with suburban law, everyone is hiding inside their houses, tending to their full stomachs and dirty dishes.

Before you know it, the door to Ms. Maryam’s house opens. You panic, of course you panic, but you regain your sense of composure when you see that the person exiting is Ms. Maryam’s oldest son, followed by her youngest. Faster than you knew your joints and muscles allowed, you duck to hide behind your car, and listen with a beating heart to the sounds of the two boys picking up their bikes.

Their voices disappear down the street.

And so, the street falls back into safe silence. You exhale, putting a hand to your chest and feel your heart calm down.

“Rose?”

The door never clicked shut after her sons, and now—your heart once again pounding inside your skull, making your veins vibrate—you hear those determined, yet light steps on her porch. They haven’t changed much since you heard her shoes clicking against the classroom floor.

“Miss- Mrs. Lalonde,” you hear her break off, and hearing those words in her mouth makes your heart twinge. “What are you doing here?” she finishes.

You’ve lost, you know you have. Numb, you rise to your feet, and turn to walk around the car to meet her straight-backed.

Mrs. Maryam is standing on the porch, her feet halfway put into a pair of high-heeled shoes and she’s wearing a tight-fitting apron. She doesn’t give you any inclination to leave when you, with faltering steps, begin to approach her and her home.

You reach the porch, and she looks down at you, stunned, silent.

“Mrs. Crocker, actually,” you say, and it hurts to form the words in front of her.

“Oh,” she responds, and now you are just standing a few feet apart. It’s a non-suggestive distance, a painfully normal distance for two acquaintances. It’s like a snare pulling you closer to one another, the colours of your eyes that burn so hot inside your head, but you resist the attraction and stay put at the safe distance.

You are both quiet, before she speaks again. “Why did you come here?” Her voice is deeper than you remember, rougher and richer with age.

You still don’t know what lead you to her home, and you tell her so: “I don’t know.”

In the silence, you take a small step forward, but then back down again when she puts a strand of hair back behind her ear.

“So, your wife…” she begins.

“Yes,” you say, “her name is Jane.”

“And children?”

“Just one, a son. Dirk. He just turned twelve.”

She looks confused for a second, as though she’s trying to pull up something from the stored memories of her past. “Dirk, is that not the name of your uncle?”

It surprises you that she would remember such a detail, but if she has lived anything like you, your existence and what she remembers of you must have lain close under the surface of her consciousness for the past decade.

“Was. He passed away a few weeks before Dave graduated,” you explain. When she just looks at you, her fine eyebrows knotted in sympathy and badly hidden curiosity, you add: “Suicide.”

It seems to take her aback, but not shock her. “My condolences,” she stumptly offers once she regains her composure.

You simply nod in response, and she has to pick up the thread of the conversation yet again. “Wait, were you and your cousin not in the same year? Didn’t you graduate together?”

You really thought you’d be more capable to talk to her, but throughout the years you have painted so many dreamy images and false pictures of her and your improbable encounter that you don’t know how to act. You feel like you are just seventeen again.

“Yes and no. We were in the same year, but Dave did graduate a year before me.” Her eyes, green as ever, look back at you blankly, not understanding, and you feel a knot form in your stomach. After she left the school, you lived through a dark period of your life; always convinced that it was your fault that she was gone and hurt. Later, that it was your fault that you hurt your mum, and that it was your fault that you pushed all your friends away.

“After you disappeared-” you begin, but desperately backtrack. All those years, living with that guilt, you’d never want to put that on someone else, least of all her. “It wasn’t easy at home,” you lie, a white lie, a half-lie, “and everything that happened in school… I needed a break.” You struggle with the words.

Of course she still understands. You can see it in her eyes, the way they are blank, yet full of emotion. You don’t know if she feels guilty or remorseful, but you know that she understands.

You blink a few times, trying to clear your eyes from water and your mind from thoughts. It’s hard to concentrate, pierced by those green eyes. “Anyway, what about you? Your family?” you ask, testing.

She seems thankful for the change of subject, but you notice a moment’s hesitation before she answers, her lips freezing for less than a second. “I married Vriska’s sister, Aranea. Vriska-” suddenly she pauses, and throws you an embarrassed glance. “Ms. Serket-”

“I know,” you interrupt. Standing there, alone with her, reminding you both of how you originally knew each other is the last thing you want to do.

“Yes, of course,” she excuses before she awkwardly continues. “Well, Vriska introduced us, and we married soon after. We moved here after we adopted Xefros, our youngest. He will enter high school next year.”

“Your youngest?” you interpose. “Who was it you were drying dishes with?”  _ Dammit _ , you curse at yourself.

She looks surprised, but then smiles her soft smile that makes your knees feel weak. Her to you unfamiliar wrinkles crinkling and shaping her face. “So you saw that,” she says, and it isn’t a question, neither an accusation. “Aranea and I decided to take in a foster child. His name is Dammek. He’s a sophomore.”

“That’s great,” you say, although you aren’t sure why.

“Yes,  _ I _ love him very much,” she says, and you are surprised by the bitter tone in which she says it.

Then you’re both quiet again, and it feels difficult to break the silence. Still, there’s a comfort in it, just standing together, eyes locked. It is near impossible to see or notice anything else when connected like that. It feels like the rest of the street has disappeared, and with it the whole world, and now it’s just the two of you, two women floating alone and still in space.

“Are you happy?” you ask her, and you have taken one step closer to her during the minutes you have been standing silent together.

“What did you say?” she mumbles, and she looks like she is genuinely confused at the question.

“With your life,” you try to explain. “With Aranea, with Dammek and Xefros. In this house…” you trail off, and break eye contact to look to the big house behind her.

It might be wishful thinking, a trick of the mind, but you are certain that she hesitates before she replies: “Of course I’m happy, Rose,” she says. “Aren’t you?”

You stare at her, and she looks back at you. Her eyes are intense, and there is something pleading inside of them. The question isn’t just about you.

“Yes, I am,” you whisper, and you take one step closer again, and now she is so close. You are so close that you can almost fool yourself into thinking that you can feel her body warmth through the chilly evening air.

The world is completely and utterly silent when your body, removed from your screaming mind, moves on its own, and all thoughts of Jane and Dirk are gone. Slowly, you lift your hand, and place it on her upper arm. Her skin is warm and rough from years of sun exposure and domestic work. Responding, she takes one step forward, entering your space, and now she is so close that you can definitely catch the smell of her skin and her rich perfume.

Your heart is racing.

She lifts a hand, curling it, and places it softly against your cheek. With close to nothing between your burning bodies and eyes, she lowers her face to get even closer to you.

“Kanaya...”

She pauses, and then she pulls away as though you have burned her. She presses against her eyes with her hands. You stand silent, until a small, faint sob rips through her chest, barely audible.

“Kanaya,” you try, but she refuses to reopen her eyes and look at you. She furiously wipes the barely formed tears from her eyes before they spill over to touch her makeup. “Mrs. Marya-”

“Please leave.”

With just those two words, it feels like it all comes back to you. Just like fifteen years ago, your stomach drops and your body grows cold. Like those fifteen years haven’t happened at all, like you’re seventeen again.

“I’m sorry, I-”

Her body trembles, and she lowers her hands to look directly at you. The corners of her eyes are tinted red and glossed over, and the strong green centre seems to you like a dagger.

Again, she begs you: “ _ Please _ , Rose.  _ Leave _ .”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, whats cooking, homies. This is gonna be good I promise. Hereby I promise that I aboslutely will not write a lesbian couple ending in tragedy. Fat chance. It's all gonna be fine, my brothers.  
> And as always, thanks so much for reading! It makes me so unbelievably happy that people like the story and also thank you for all your comments and kudos!!


	4. Inevitability

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Not every part of life is hard. It can only get better from here.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Are suburban mothers the unhappiest people on Earth? Vote down below!

You wish you could say that you didn’t look back after the door to that classroom slammed shut behind you. But you did. As you rushed down the school hallway, you looked over your shoulder— _ twice _ , you looked—but Miss Lalonde didn’t follow you, and in a way, you were thankful for that. But for some reason, it also  _ hurt _ .

You didn’t even call in sick, or inform your workplace in any other way that you wouldn’t be at your first lesson. And you didn’t call the next day either; you simply couldn’t bring yourself to hear the voice of any of the other adults you had worked with all your adult life. So instead, you just lay at home.

Like this, so many years later, it’s hard to remember exactly how it all went down, but you do know that during that period of your life, you cried more than you had ever done before. You never saw yourself as the crying type of person, but something—surely, something biological—had become undone within you in that less than a second of a moment of eye contact with Rose Lalonde.

Unleashed.

And your tears just kept flooding from your eyes as you drove home, and as Vriska came to drive you to her apartment the next night, and they kept pouring as the days following that came and went.

Vriska did ask questions, but something in the way she looked at you told you that she wasn’t going to push further than for surface level answers. You told her that you needed a break, that everything at work had just been building up for so long and that you couldn’t take it anymore.

Of course she knew you were lying.

After a month, she helped you hand in your resignation notice to work, and she coerced you into making several phone calls to doctors, psychologists, and to your parents.

To a beginning, you were glad that she didn’t force the reason to your sudden breakdown out of you, but years down the road, you really began to wish that she had. To have just  _ one friend  _ through your hardships would have been enough.

You spent the first couple of weeks sleeping on Vriska’s sofa, before she helped you clean your apartment to move back into your own home.

And you knew that you could never teach again. At least not children. Not children, like Rose had been. Though, of course, the more you thought about it, Rose Lalonde hadn’t been a  _ child _ ; only per legal definition. And you also knew, deep down, that nothing that had transpired between the two of you had been illicit or unseemly. Your conscience should be clean.

Vriska helped you find a new job through her older sister, Aranea. So that was where you spent the following year, at a school for ‘mentally challenged’ who needed base classes for basic job applications. The job fit Aranea, at least in her own opinion, as she got to talk and talk without anyone stopping her, but it certainly didn’t fit you. It was a blessing when your mother was able to get you in contact with a local community college just a few miles away from where you already lived.

And that was how you ended up with your family of four in a quiet suburban neighbourhood.

As for Aranea, you can’t pinpoint one single, specific moment in which you  _ chose _ to marry her. Everything had simply fallen into place, and till this day you still have a suspicion that that was the actual reason as to why Vriska introduced the two of you to begin with.

You are incredibly thankful for everything that Vriska has ever done for you, but asking if her help is needed—or wanted—has never been one of her core personality traits.

But you did marry. Not more than three years after that classroom door slammed shut behind you, you found yourself at the altar next to your wife-to-be.

You had been happier.

She was very beautiful, dressed in a white dress that she had sewn herself, and the fabric was pasted tight to her body, leaving little to nothing to anyone’s imagination. It wasn’t exactly proper for a wedding—sending all kinds of mixed signals to you and the attendees on the day when she was supposed to give herself to you and you to her—but neither was two women marrying in a church.

Throughout the entire ceremony, Vriska’s words rang loud in your mind, so loud that you barely heard when the priest told you to say your vows. She told you right after Aranea proposed to you that it was all her idea, and then she said:   _ ‘If you don’t take this chance I’ve worked my ass off to help you get, you’ll be alone forever, Kanaya. Is that really what you want?’ _

That wasn’t what you wanted. You had always wanted to raise a family, just not with Aranea.

Though it could all have been worse, of course. You could be in jail for having a secret relationship with an underaged student, for starters. 

Not that you didn’t dream about it, at least in the beginning. To run away, to knock on Rose Lalonde’s window in the dead of night and drive away. Far, far away. You know she’d come with. In the beginning, you allowed yourself those self-indulgent, escapist fantasies.

Because the first few years, and especially the first few months of those years, were the worst of any relationship you had ever been in. You and Aranea, you didn’t  _ know _ each other, and you hadn’t lived together before the wedding, and many times, it seemed like you wouldn’t be for long  _ after _ , either.

Then you adopted Xefros, and everything calmed down. You still haven’t told him that he only ever was a band-aid for your broken marriage, not that you haven’t loved and cared for him every single day of his fourteen-year-old life, just like any other good parent.

You consider yourself to be a good mother—a great mother, in fact—and that’s why you agreed to take in Dammek later on. You have never regretted  _ that _ decision, although you know that Aranea has, and in your opinion, she isn’t very good at hiding it. Her displeasure with her foster son’s rebellious behaviour and slick, sarcastic retorts shows itself quite clearly in her public crying in the kitchen, her too-loud complaining behind closed doors at night, and her constant ‘putting Dammek’s guitar on time-out’s tell her opinion of him quite clearly. You know that he can tell, he has told you so.

You don’t think unloving, calculating people like your wife should be allowed to have children. But in a way, you’re an accomplice. Because everyone knows that the children of non-soulmates, of _ ‘ordinaries’ _ , never turn out quite perfect. That the relationships are too tricky to be able to care for anyone but for yourself. And everyone knows that either you, the children, or the relationship will break.

It’s inevitable. Everyone knows that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Big homo. I'm so looking forward to Part 3 of this story when everything will be beautiful, lovely, and big homo. See you there. And thanks! big time thanks! For all and every piece of support thus far! Love y'all mwah (and if i haven't responded to your comment it's bc i couldn't think of a way to do it without sounding like a Fool but know this: i cried happy tears in my heart when i read it)


	5. Breath

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Since she isn't your soulmate..."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (this chapter totally didn't go like i planned it to wow...wild ride huh)  
> anyway, wow i felt kinda bad for taking so long to finish this chapter, but then i saw that it turned out to be a whoopin' 5101 words so... yeah! hope y'all enjoy...

“Mom?”

Dirk, your and Jane’s son, stands in the door to your bedroom, one foot hesitantly placed inside and one outside, a hand on the wall.

You look up to meet his eyes. The irony that you chose to name him after Dave’s father hits you, as they look almost nothing alike, and thankfully aren’t similar in mannerism, either. Though, sometimes, you think that you can descry some of the other Dirk’s eyes in your son, sometimes in the way his hair falls.

Jane asked you once why you insisted so fiercely on naming your son after someone who died in such a tragic way. You answered that you wanted to honour family tradition, that your grandmother had been named Rose and that her mother has been named Roxanne. And since you were the one carrying the child, Jane let your wish come to pass in the end.

The answer that you gave was, of course, a blatant lie. The family tradition was indeed real, and your mother hugged you tightly when you told her of Dirk’s name, but the tradition wasn’t the reason for your decision. If you were to be completely honest with yourself, you don’t really care about traditions at all. Case in point, you’re a lesbian living with your biological son and his mother in a suburban neighbourhood. You go to PTA meetings.

No, you named your son Dirk because you knew that, otherwise, your cousin would try to erase his father from your family history. And keeping family together is what is most important to you. Growing up with your mother, you learned to value what you have.

“Yes, Dirk?” you respond, putting down the three knitting needles that you have been wrestling with during the morning. You thought that you would try out something new; a new pattern. If you dare say so yourself, it is turning out quite well.

Dirk stays in the doorway, but he takes down his hand from the doorframe and instead puts both his hands in his front pockets. He weighs on his toes. “Someone in school said I could come over and play at his house.”

A fully normal sentence, but his words confuse you. You feel like there is something lying behind them, otherwise he wouldn’t be asking you like this. Just the fact that you are referring to it as ‘asking’ is reason enough for it to be curious in your book.

“That’s nice. Do I know him?” you ask pleasantly, and continue to work with your needles. You expect Dirk to tell you the truth soon enough.

“No…” Dirk says, lingering on the word. He is quiet for a second. Then he takes a small, sharp breath and continues: “I don’t think he actually wants to play with me, you know?” You catch a twinge of desperate dejection in his voice.

“Nonsense,” you retort, “this family is lovely and it is a  _ privilege  _ to play with you, Dirk. I should know.”

“Mom-”

You huff, pretending upset, and pat the mattress next to you. “Come sit, son.”

You catch Dirk rolling his eyes briefly—a habit he has picked up just recently, probably from you—but despite himself, he carefully treads into your bedroom and sits down on the bed beside you. The mattress barely budges under his weight.

“So,” you say, and cross your legs in front of yourself and look your son in the eyes. “Why on Earth wouldn’t this boy want to play with you? I, for one, cannot think of any valid reason.”

In the way Dirk sucks his lips, it is clear that he is trying to avoid the question. That there is something he doesn’t want to say, or something he doesn’t want to ask. Though, finally—as you knew he would—he responds. “His brother told me.”

_ That  _ catches you off guard. You were expecting that the other would be older or ‘cooler’ than Dirk (not that there was any risk of  _ that _ being the case, according to your professional opinion as his mother), or that he wasn’t the usual kind of person that you would expect Dirk to spend time with.  _ Not  _ that the other would have already outright  _ rejected _ your son, plain and simple.

“Maybe his brother is jealous?” you suggest.

Dirk shakes his head. “He’s  _ sixteen _ .” He says the word ‘sixteen’ as though most sixteen-year-olds aren’t incredibly awkward, as though being sixteen is credential enough to not ever being jealous of a twelve-year-old stealing your brother. Actually, maybe it is.

You purse your lips and furrow your brow, leaning your chin on one hand. Keeping up a screen of pensive appearance is an important part of treating your child’s problems with dignity and respect. “Do  _ you _ want to play with this boy?” you ask, but a thought hits you before time allows Dirk to respond. “What’s his name, anyway?”

“Oh, it’s Xefros.”

_ Oh. _

Dirk’s lips only have the time to form the very first syllable of Kanaya Maryam’s son’s name before your world slows down. That so familiar tingling feeling at the tips of your fingers makes itself homestead, the tingling that followed you when you handed assignments over to Ms. Maryam, when you pressed ‘submit’ on that one Instagram comment, when you knocked on her door the day after. Dirk’s mouth continues to move, and you have troubles following his words even though you hear everything he says with excruciating clarity.

“He hasn’t talked to me before, but I know him because he’s got two mums too. People say that, anyway. So he walked up to me today. School was out so we weren’t skipping. I think he’s in eighth grade. So he walked up to me, and he was like ‘uh, my mom says you can come play, like, FIFA at my place on Saturday.’ And my friends weren’t there so I was like ‘okay’ and he like ‘oh, wait. Sorry. You  _ are  _ Dirk Lalonde, right?’ and I just ‘no, Crocker.’ But then I remembered that your name  _ used  _ to be Lalonde so I told him that, and he went like ‘oh. Okay.’”

You don’t know how to react. It is all going too fast. You look at your son, and he wrings his hands uncomfortably in front of him. When you don’t say anything, just look at him stunned, he continues his story:

“So I told him I’d come, because like, he’s in eighth grade! And he added me on Snapchat so we could decide when I’d come, right? And then suddenly his brother was there, and he was much taller than both me and Xefros. I think his name’s…Derrek? And he said their mum was there to pick them up. And then he like, looked super angry at me! Or, I mean, he was wearing sunglasses, but I know Uncle Dave so I could totally see he was pissed with me, you know? And he told Xefros to go to the car, and he did, and then it was just me and his brother there. And I couldn’t see any teachers around either. And he got really close and said like ‘you know he’s just asking you because his mum wants to invite  _ your _ mum’ and I asked if she wasn’t his mum too, and then he spat on the ground and walked away and didn’t even look back.”

Dirk takes a deep breath as he finishes his story and exhales it shakily, and you watch him. You know that he is curious about what Dammek told him; that he doesn’t quite understand what it meant and that he is burning to know. You can see it in the way he throws you quick, quizzing glances. But you know that he won’t ask you, and so you won’t tell him.

The second thought in your mind is that Kanaya is trying to meet you. Maybe she wants to make it official that you two shouldn’t have any more contact, maybe she needs to clarify something that she said when you came over to her house. You feel your neck grow hot and your chest contract when you remember that evening, that you showed up so indiscreetly to her front door without any kind of plan of what to do or what to say. It could have ended so much worse.

Your third, forbidden thought, is that she is using your sons to lead an affair.

To break the silence, prodding, you ask Dirk a question, something normal. “Your mother told me Jude and Joey won’t be coming this weekend. Maybe it would be fun to get to play video games with someone else instead?” When Dirk doesn’t look convinced, you add, “Even if Dammek is jealous that his brother wants to play with you.”

Dirk sits silent for a second, seemingly having overseen your leap of logic. “Do you really think he’s jealous?”

You don’t know if Dammek is jealous of Dirk, it is just as likely that he is jealous of  _ you _ . He is sixteen, after all, and that is just one year younger than what you were when you and his mother made direct eye contact for the first time. Suddenly you see the event from Ms. Maryam’s perspective, and you get a sinking feeling to your stomach.

What is important now, though, is that Kanaya Maryam’s oldest son might have figured out what relationship it is that his mother has with you, at least partly, and you don’t know how a punk like him would react to that kind of suspicions.

You reach forward, and Dirk closes his eyes when you ruffle his hair. “What isn’t there to be jealous of?”

Barely a month has passed, and now you once again find yourself standing on the porch of Mrs. Kanaya Maryam’s mint green house.

The situation is very different, however, and the strangeness of it is made abundantly apparent to you when your son Dirk looks up at you. He is nervous, you can tell, so you smile at him, encouraging, and he smiles back.

You ring the doorbell.

It is not uncommon for Dirk to be nervous before being to a friend’s house for the first time. He has always been of a more anxious nature, more anxious than both you and your wife ever were, which is why he has always preferred to stay at home and play computer games online with his friends from school. It is rare for him to go on a playdate with any of the children of your family’s acquaintances.

What Dirk doesn’t know, what he can’t see behind your mom-façade, is that in this moment, you are infinitely more nervous than him. To him, this is a day just like any else, even if it is exciting to be invited to play with both a fourteen- and a sixteen-year-old.

To you, this is something cosmological, something biological, something that both your mind, soul, and body have been waiting for since the day you were born. On some subconscious level, you think that you might have been waiting for this day since that second when the classroom door slammed closed behind Ms. Maryam fifteen years ago.

Someone opens the door, and you catch your breath.

It isn’t her.

It’s her oldest son, Dammek, and he looks to be the opposite of excited for the two of you to be there. He has pulled his leather jacket halfway shut, and he is wearing his thick, black sunglasses even though he clearly has been indoors the entire morning. He’s tugging at his upper lip with his teeth, to give clear light that he simply doesn’t give a shit. In many ways, you agree with Dirk that he has many similarities to your cousin Dave.

Despite Dammek’s hostile demeanour, you see Dirk straighten up where he stands in the corner of your eye.

Dammek turns around without acknowledging neither you nor your son, and yells: “ _ Mom! _ ” He then turns back to you and puffs. “She’ll be here in a second.”

You decide to take the matter into your own hands; after all, you  _ have _ been dealing with Dave for more than thirty years. You reach your hand out to the teen, and offer a motherly smile. “Rose Crocker, I’m an old friend of your mother’s.”

He grabs your hand immediately—few children can refuse a strange mother’s polite handshake—and you see in his eye that it takes him by surprise. For a punk, his hand is surprisingly slender and soft.

“This is Dirk,” you continue, and Dammek lamely shakes your son’s hand as well. “And you must be Dammek.” The killing blow. According to all known laws of psychology and intimidation, you ought to have him under your complete control by now.  _ ‘Punks are probably more afraid of you than you are of them’. _

Dirk wipes his hands on his trousers, something his namesake would never do, never show weakness, and that’s when  _ she  _ makes her entrance.

She looks painfully domestic. Black jeans, a black turtleneck, and slight, discrete silver jewellery. Perfectly distinguished with her greying black hair and dark, fine lines. You cannot tell whether she has dressed up for this occasion, or not.

You catch yourself holding your breath as she takes the last few steps to join her foster son at the door. She hasn’t changed her hair much since you knew her. Not that you ever really did.

It doesn’t feel quite real to stand in front of her in plain daylight like this.

She smiles at your son, ignoring you at first, but considering the context, she is clearly doing it on purpose. For a worrying second, you’re afraid that Dammek will catch you looking at her, or notice any of your eyes.

“Hello, Dirk,” she says simply, a warm, maternal smile on her lips. She nods shortly to you, but quickly looks away. Her eyes are already burning green, but you have yet to feel any caressing warmth behind your own eyes. She must have an astounding sense of self-control.

She places a hand on Dammek’s shoulder, and gives him a look and a squeeze. He nods back courtly, and with a sting of panic you realise that the boy must know more about your situation than you could ever even imagine telling Dirk. You can even see the green of her eyes reflecting in his sunglasses. Which might mean that the paranoia that you have felt over him figuring out his mother’s secret might have been superfluous, as, after all,  _ you are here _ .

Dammek sighs, but then straightens, and looks at Dirk. Of course you can neither see nor hear it, but you are almost certain that your son swallows his nerves when the older boy gives him such a straight, piercing look.

“We have some shit- some  _ biscuits  _ upstairs. Xefros is already there. He didn’t want to pause the game.”

“Cool,” Dirk squeaks. And then they’re off. Dammek ushers your son away from you with a hand against Dirk’s back, and then ascends the stairs three steps at a time himself.

The stairs stop creaking, the bedroom door to the boys’ room slams shut upstairs, and as the muffled sound of the boys settling in dies out, the bottom floor is laid in complete silence.

Suddenly you have no idea what to do with your body; your arms hang limply by your sides, so you cross them, but your bodyweight feels oddly evenly distributed on your two feet, and no matter how much you shift, it doesn’t feel quite right. Your tongue feels just one size too big for your mouth.

You know that Kanaya is looking at you.

You don’t want to face her, not yet. Because you still don’t know if she asked you to come because she wanted to beg you farewell properly, or if she is going to ask something of you that you aren’t ready or willing to give. In a way, it was easier when the age difference felt more prominent; back then, back when you didn’t carry any of the responsibility.

The silence is broken by a nervous giggle from upstairs; it isn’t Dirk’s, and you cannot imagine Dammek  _ giggling _ , which only really leaves Xefros. You wonder if he’s nice.

You feel a light hand on your shoulder.

You startle and swing around. You realise that your eyes have grown wide when you see Mrs. Maryam’s mirrored expression, startled and shocked. The lines around her mouth cut deeper into her smooth skin. She stands with one hand extended, but lowers it quickly. She folds it under her other arm and shoots you a shy smile, or perhaps just sheepish.

“I can take your jacket,” she says, and meets your eyes. At every glance, the feeling of what could have been surges through your system. It is as though a thousand possible timelines sear through your entire being, leaving light traces of what happy endings you could have gotten. If only you had acted differently, acted faster. But, after all, you were only seventeen.

When she takes your jacket and folds it over her arm, you realise that you have sealed a deal. You are staying with Kanaya Maryam, just this day. You will drink coffee with her, maybe a drink, you will talk with her about unimportant things and about things that you should not even think about. Just until it is time for you and Dirk to go back home to Jane.

You close your eyes and let out a deep breath, and then reopen them.

Mrs. Maryam is still looking at you, curiously, uncertain. 

“Maybe we should move somewhere?” you suggest, carefully, but putting on a certain, but casual, tone. As though there is nothing underlying your words, just two mothers sharing an afternoon. The only mild uncertainty that might have slipped through could be interpreted as the uncertainty accompanying being in a acquaintance's home for the first time. “To sit down while the boys play,” you continue.

At that, she smiles, and you feel your throat clench. Her polite, reserved smile hasn’t changed at all and it is all too similar to the copy of it that you have stored deep inside your mind. She nods acknowledgingly, and replies: “Aranea and I just bought a new couch, it’s mocka. Coffee?”

“Thank you,” you reply in return, and you nod to her to lead the way to the living-room. So that the two of you can sit down on the Maryams’ new couch, together, at a distance from each other just wide enough apart to not ever risk falling into a comfortable pace of conversation.

And so you sit, and so you thank her when she hands you a mug of coffee, and so you watch her walk through the opensolution kitchen-dining hall of her home. You can feel that the couch is newly bought, that it is still especially soft yet rigid, comfortable, but you don’t allow yourself to sink into it.

Kanaya Maryam glides, strides gracefully, across the floor, setting forth and putting away cups and dishes. She manages to look elegant in black jeans. And your heart stings every time she pushes a strand of hair back behind her ear.

Everything in front of you feels so surreal, it cannot be real.

Fifteen years, and now you’re drinking from a thick-brimmed mug of dark coffee in Mrs. Maryam’s living-room. Much more bitter than what Jane drinks, but in your opinion, it is perfect.

Mrs. Maryam escapes from your sight of view, and you feel the sofa budge down beside you, and even at the awkwardly great distance, you can feel the heat of her body radiate from her skin through the air.

Your eyes are burning.

That is something that most couples do not have to worry about, as most people either do not find their soulmate at all, or actually do end up marrying theirs. But to know your soulmate, and for them to know you, there is a factor of nature there, you are certain, that pulls you to one another. If the circumstances were different,  _ if Kanaya Maryam was still my biology teacher _ , you think with disdain, then you might have brought it up, shared your thoughts on what happens to you when you are close to her. But as it is now, you can only focus on her body being next to yours, and everything else becomes background noise.

In the right corner of your eye, you see her knees turn towards you, and, without thought, you turn to her, too.

She sits with her mug of coffee in her hands, her elegant fingers gently placed around it, the sinew at the back of her hands more prominent than what you remember. But the same can be said about your hands. When she notices you looking at her, she tips her head forward to take a sip of her black coffee, hiding behind the strand of hair that falls into her face. Maybe it is the heat of steam, but her face looks a bit clammy, flushed.

You lean your body to the right, just a centimetre closer to her, shuffle your bodyweight over the smooth mocka. You want to talk to her so badly, just slip into natural, comfortable,  _ domestic _ conversation, and forget about everything that is keeping you two apart.

Mrs. Maryam clears her throat and puts her mug down on the sofa table. She smiles pleasantly, but you can sense that she feels as lost as you do, and the silence is growing heavy again. So she begins: “It was nice of you to come.”

You take a last sip of your coffee—so rushed that you almost swallow it down your windpipe—the last sip before your coffee mugs will stand to colden and never be touched again that day, and you nod to answer. “Yes,” you pause, “though I  _ was _ rather surprised. At your method.”

A light blush travels onto her cheeks, and she looks so full of health that it makes your head feel light. “I admit it was a bit… unconventional, yes,” she replies in turn and smiles hastily at you. “But, after you came by- Well, I wanted to see you.”

Your stomach drops and you look at her, more closely, but you cannot seem to focus on her face. You can’t help but ask her, so you do:

“Why? With risk of making things uncomfortable, my last visit didn’t end on the happiest of notes, after all.”

She leans back a bit, settling into the couch. She sighs. “I really am sorry about that, it’s just that it’s not so easy, and because of my family-” her eyes move up to the ceiling, up to where your boys are playing Grand Theft Auto or Minecraft or whatever it is that kids like these days. “... I cannot always do what I want.”

Her eyes turn to meet yours, discreetly glancing at you from the corner of her eyes, through her heavy eyelids. Their colour is as green as ever, shining their light into your face. She sucks at the inside of her cheek, and with that unconscious action, she looks younger, more juvenile, than the two of you have been in years. Full of curiosity and childish nerves.

The electricity in the air frightens you, makes your stomach fall even deeper but increases your heart rhythm at the same pace. You ask the question: “What is it that you want?” You move just a little bit closer over the couch, a lone centimetre, and fold your hands in your lap. An elegant posture that has almost always come naturally to you.

Mrs. Maryam puts a hand on the cushion that separates your bodies, an invisible wall, and thus she breaches the agreement that you both made when you entered her house. She leans in a little towards you, and you can feel your nostrils flare in display.

“What  _ don’t _ we want?” she says, and hurries to smile. That kind of half-smile, like the Mona Lisa. “I want Xefros to raise his grades, and I want Dammek to not use abasing insults to veil his already reciprocated affections for my son, and I want Aranea to love and respect Dammek just like I do.” She furrows her brow suddenly, as though in a mild ache, and with closed eyes, she continues: “And I wish that I hadn’t been in the kind of hurry that I was to get married, to her.”

She removes her slender fingers from the cushion between you, and once again, that invisible, agreed upon wall of security separates you. Your wandering eyes and your increasing body heat.

You wipe your brow.

You take her hand.

You feel her breath stop, and your senses are overwhelmed by the softness of her skin, the pale, aging hand, cold, the thin hairs continuing from her wrist and arm. You remove her hand from her thigh, place it back between the two of you on the couch’s middle cushion.

“I didn’t plan to marry Jane, either,” you tell the air, and rub a circle on the back of Kanaya Maryam’s hand, ignoring how wrong it is. “But when I found out that I was going to become a mother, that we both were, and that Dirk was going to be a part of our lives… ” You trail off, knowing that additional words would be superfluous.

Kanaya’s hand tenses in yours. “Dirk is biological?”

You stop. “Yes, Jane’s and mine,” you reply, although suddenly warily. You didn’t expect to have to defend your wife in front of Mrs. Maryam, of all people.

“Oh,” she simply replies, at first. Then: “Weren’t you afraid? Since-” she breaks off, but continues, “since I’m not his mother.”

You know that you’re an adult, that you have passed thirty and that you have birthed a son, but still you blush at her words, not knowing how to stop yourself from conjuring up images of yourself and Mrs. Maryam in your head. The always forbidden romance. Though, biologically, it would of course have been impossible for her to ever be your child’s mother, but that fact doesn’t stop your brain from flashing images of skin and sweat and bodies inside your mind.

“Since she’s not my soulmate?” you offer, loosening the grip of her hand, after realising that you had hugged it tighter as your mind ran its inner theatre.

She nods beside you. And then she turns, leaning towards you, and grabs your hand with her other hand as well, your hand that was already holding hers. She embraces it between her fingers, enclosing it in both her hands. “Yes, since she isn’t your soulmate,” she says, and you feel the muscles in her wrists tense before you feel the pull of her arms, pulling your arms and thus your body towards her. You are losing your balance.

“Since she isn’t me,” she explains further. She leads your body closer.

You involuntarily let out a heavy breath, noticeably loud, and your tongue flickers over your lips, ruining your perfectly applied lipstick.

Your hands connect with the cushion that she is sitting on, right next to her, your knuckles brushing her thigh, and you pull your legs up with you onto the sofa, quickly scrambling to her across the cushions, kicking off your high-heeled shoes in your struggle to get closer to her body as quickly as possible.

She helps you settle in her lap, one knee on each side of her thighs, and you feel the muscles of her legs and abdomen move under you. She brushes her light fingertips over your clothed back.

She lets out a heaving, shaky breath, and you feel the hot air on your collarbone. You blush at her lazily open lips as they ghost over your neck.

Then, you meet eyes.

That feeling, the same feeling that filled you both fifteen years ago, burns inside your heart, your stomach, the heat travels through your arms and your legs, and finally it comes to rest behind your glowing, coloured eyes.

She groans—and her sound sends a hot shiver up your spine—but quickly she closes her eyes and smiles, appearing abashed, and leans her forehead against yours. You laugh lightly in return, airy, and you can taste her breath on your lips.

Fifteen years.

You close your eyes, and slowly, shaking, chests heaving, you sense the warmth of her lips move closer to yours. She brushes your upper lip, you close in.

Dammek’s dry laugh emerges from right above you, the thin drywall ceiling not concealing Xefros quiet returning giggle nor Dirk shushing the other two boys to let him concentrate on the game, your ever serious son.

You open your eyes.

Kanaya is staring at you, eyes wide but her pupils still dilated and her cheeks flushed. Her body tingling with the suspense, the excitement. Her face moves in front of you to the rhythm of her heaving chest, in sync with your own.

You let your arms fall down, limp at your sides, but still sitting in the lap of your old biology teacher, in the house of her wife, waiting for her to decide to push you off of her. You watch her face as she stares into yours in return, both of your eyes still glowing in the clearest of green and purple.

She closes her eyes again, furrowing her brow, as though in grief, and leans her head against your chest. You swallow.

Face hidden, pressed against your breasts, she runs her hand up your back one last time, letting her light fingertips trace your spine from your tailbone up to where it connects with your skull. You shiver under the touch, and a heat settles into the bottom of your stomach. A quiet whine escapes your lips.

Then she lets her hand fall down onto the couch, brushing lightly against your own limp hand, and still with closed eyes, she puts her other hand against your chest, urging you to remove yourself from her, to stumble off of her lap and to pretend like nothing ever happened.

So you do.

And so you straighten out your skirt, and put your shoes back on. And so she fans her face, wipes the sweat from her neck and rises to her feet. And so she offers to pour you a drink and so you accept, and so the afternoon continues until it is time for you to drive your son home to the dinner that your wife has prepared for your family.

And so you pretend like nothing ever happened.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> booyah! thank y'all for reading!! and as always, kudos and comments etc. are so so appreciated it means a lot, ya know! well then, like, 2 more chapters to go? (in part 2) but they'll most likely be shorter heyo


	6. Red Handed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The guilt is unbearable. The guilt is all-consuming.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wooow... this took so long to write (that's a lie. I wrote 70% of it today)... Hope it's satisfactory though! Also thank you for reading, we are wlw gang gang.

But something did happen. And you cannot convince your wife that it didn’t.

It would be incorrect to say that everything changed after you got home from that playdate over at the Maryams’, because such a small event feels, at least to you, too insignificant to change a person’s life and relationships forever.

But it would also be incorrect to say that everything stayed the same. After that one Friday afternoon, you found it hard, or at least  _ harder _ , to look your wife in the eye. Yes, in part because of guilt, but more chiefly, because—after your encounter with Mrs. Maryam, on her couch, eyes locked together—it became so painfully obvious to you that that was something that you and your wife will never ever be able to have. Not because Jane isn’t a lovely woman and a good wife—she is—but simply because of sheer chemicals.

Though, also, had the economical factors not played a part, and had you gotten to choose whether you’d marry a person like Jane today, if you’d gotten asked to marry her again, you’d most likely have said ‘no’. You think that you can say this with confidence, unrelated to your yearning for Kanaya Maryam. That yearning simply was the first ball of snow on the downward hill that is your marriage.

You never thought you’d get away with what you did, either, that Jane would pinpoint the guilty, yet frustrated, look in your eyes right away; but the next day, when you sat down to have breakfast together—like you sometimes did, even though you usually only had cereals—she said nothing. You could even see the glowing, purple spots reflecting back up at you from your milk bowl, like a reminder that you didn’t love the woman sitting opposite of you. But still, she said nothing.

It makes you angry. You don’t know whether Jane is acting the way she is because of the usual kid gloves and eggshells that she uses and trodds around you, or if it’s because she’s already made up her mind to stay with you even if you are cheating on her; and both options make you inexplicably angry. You married a woman of power and pondus, a woman with a spine, and the possibility that your history of tantrums and fits might have eroded that backbone of hers, that is the scariest thing that you have ever experienced in your entire life.

You can’t blame Kanaya for making your eyes glow a constant purple during the past weeks, either, because you are certain that hers have glowed just as strongly as yours, but in green. From the second you open your eyes in the morning, till the second you close them at night, you think of her. The way she moves, how her breath felt against your skin on that couch and how you know that she doesn’t love her own wife; it is all you can think of.

Dirk hasn’t seemed to notice, or maybe he is better at hiding his emotions than what you’ve previously given him credit for. He is growing up, after all, and if he's anything like you were at his age, he’ll soon start to hide countless of secrets.

One day, when you knocked on his door and entered without waiting for an answer, just to talk about something trivial, your eyes locked with his as his head snapped up from where he was sitting on his bed in the dark, face buried in his phone, and for a moment you thought that his eyes were bright purple like yours. But after a mere fraction of a second you realised that it was the reflection of your own eyes, and you quickly closed the door in front of you. You stayed like that, hand on the handle, for several minutes. Chest heaving.

You know that Dirk knows what your shining eyes mean.

 

* * *

 

 

Aranea isn’t speaking with you. In fact, she hasn’t said a word in your direction in weeks. Granted, she has always been overly polite publicly, but she’s never actually been the quiet, timid type within the sphere of your shared home. She hasn’t even been yelling at Dammek since that friday, not even when she caught him holding a sniffling Xefros in his arms on his bed.

Everyone has seen your shining eyes.

You have tried to stay out of the house most days; working overtime at the local community college, picking the boys up from school only to drive back to work, sometimes meeting with Dammek in parks and at cafés to talk, something that he sadly seems to appreciate more than he should have to. But you can’t stay out of the house most days, not completely, at least not at night.

Your students have begun to whisper again, for the first time in  _ fifteen years _ , but in a way, it is worse than when you worked in high school. Because when you worked in high school, you weren’t yet married, and the students’ minds weren’t capable of coming up with scandalous rumours of the caliber that your students now are. They know that you’re married, and they know that your eyes haven’t been glowing before. Hardly a lecture goes by without heads turning and eyebrows being raised. It makes your blood shine through your skin and you stumble through your lectures, losing your train of thought constantly.

Your wife has also started to exhibit an array of strange behaviours; not strange as in objectively worrisome nor strange as in outwardly eccentric, but strange as in doing things that she would never have done just two months ago.

She shuts the blinds early at night, peering through them to see if any of your neighbours have taken notice of your changed family situation. She eyes all the women on the street suspiciously, as well as the other mums picking up children at your sons’ schools. She barely ever leaves the house, and she has started to comment on all your Instagram posts.

You can’t blame her for acting like a jealous teenager. It doesn’t matter that you put a stop to your and Rose’s infidelities on that couch, you still entertained the thought, and you crossed an uncountable number of lines. Aranea has any right to be suspicious, controlling, and obsessive.  _ You  _ created this situation all on your own.

And there is nothing you can do to undo what you have done.

One night, when you come home after a fourteen hour shift at work, Aranea is still sitting in the kitchen. All lamps in the house are turned off, spare the one in Dammek’s room. Despite knowing that nothing good can come of it, you undim the kitchen lamp.

She’s been crying, you can tell, but probably stopped and washed her face free of tears over an hour ago. She probably thinks that you wouldn’t notice, but of course you do. You’ve been married for over ten years.

She looks up at you. She doesn’t smile, as she would have done two months ago, but she doesn’t avert her gaze either.

You stand still in the doorway.

“Sit,” she says bluntly. You detect a tremble in her voice, and your heart falls into your stomach.

You obey. As you sit, you begin to reach out to grab her hand, but stop halfway across the table. She pulls her hands back towards her chest, and then hides them from you under the table.

She looks away for a second and sucks in a shaky breath. She turns back and her grey eyes meet your green.

Then:

“ _ Please _ ,” she says, “ _ please _ tell me who it is.”

As you look into her begging eyes, you know that this is an olive branch, the only one you’re going to get. It should be so easy to grab it, just to tell her everything. Tell her the secret that has been aching deep inside of you since even before you met her.

It breaks your heart to see  _ Aranea  _ at such a low point that she’d resort to  _ begging _ . It breaks your heart to know that you have done this to her, made her this way. She places her hands back up on the table between you, but she doesn’t smile.

You look at her puffy, red eyes, her thin, tight lips and disarrayed, greying hair, and you realise that you can’t tell her. You have been carrying this secret for so long, and you have never told anyone. No friends, no family, no lovers. No one knows, except you, and Rose Lalonde.

Your wife watches your face shift as you come to your decision, and when she realises what has just happened, her shoulders sag and she lets her hands fall back into her lap, away from you.

You sit frozen, cold, as she buries her face in her hands, takes one deep breath, the sound of your marriage entering a new phase, and then she rises from the table on stiff legs.

“Goodnight,” she says, simply, as if nothing has happened at all, and then she walks out of the kitchen. You hear her footsteps scaling the stairs up to your shared bedroom.

You think you will sleep at the office tonight.

 

* * *

 

 

It’s been two months, and you and Jane still haven’t had a fight. Usually, when there is something to discuss and sort out, you yell at each other for a while to get an outlet for your frustration, and then you swallow the remaining feelings to be able to go along with your days normally. Never go to bed angry.

But now it’s been two months, and the guilt is eating you up inside out.

Not guilt over what you did, not really, but guilt over what you still want to do. Because despite what you have done to your family, despite what you most likely have done to the Maryams, you can’t help but let your thoughts float over to what a life with Kanaya would be like.

When you don’t watch yourself, when you don’t keep your thoughts in check, your mind is filled with what might have happened if the sound of Dammek’s laughter hadn’t interrupted you and Kanaya. If you two really had gone all the way, had it felt more like a confirmation? A decision being made then and there? Had something in your ‘soulmate chemicals’  been activated, or had you simply felt a guilt strong enough to leave your respective wives?

When your mind isn’t occupied with entertaining ‘what ifs’, and not busy with images of Mrs. Maryam’s body against yours, her lips against your skin, your thighs stradling hers, you think of what it would be like to greet her when she comes home from a long day at work, or what it would be like to have dinner together with your sons. What would it be like to smile at her, and have her smile at you, without any of you feeling any guilt or shame? What would it be like to kiss her, at home, in town, at work, and not feel any need to hide it?

You are ashamed to admit that you don’t last long, and after but two months you find yourself alone in your car, driving towards the street where you two nearly kissed on her porch so long ago, the first time you talked since she slammed that classroom door shut.

When you arrive, slowly creeping down her street with your car, it is already dark. When you left home, Jane was in her home office, finishing up her day’s work, and Dirk had gone off to bed, and it seems like the Maryams are in a similar state. Only two lamps on the upper floor are turned on.

You sit in your car, hands tightly grabbing the soft fur decoration adorning your steering wheel, and you watch for any type of movement inside the house. Squinting, and your lips tight, you see flashes of a computer game in one of the unlit rooms, and the silhouette of a tall, elegant woman pacing one of the lit ones, sitting down on the bed only to rise seconds later.

You know that it is Kanaya, you’d recognise her posture and form anywhere.

You pause for a moment, but stubbornly ignore the warning signals screaming inside your chest. This is it, it is something you have to do.

You open the car door and step out, and one, two, three, four long strides and you’ve crossed the street. Your excited breath fans hotly against the inside of your open lips as you look up at the house. If Aranea answers the door, if she isn’t asleep, you’ll simply ask for the Egberts and pretend like you’ve gotten the wrong house. And if Kanaya opens the door…

You ring the doorbell. One long tone, vibrating into the house.

A minute passes. Then two. The cold, dark night air is creeping its way inside your knitted sweater, and you cross your arms. Then you hear something click on the other side of the door, the friction of the door handle moving.

When the door swings open, you see that it thankfully is Kanaya that opens it,  _ thank the Gods _ , you think and exhale in relief, but the nerves quickly close in on you again. As she opens the door, you see her green eyes register you, take you in, and her mouth falls open.

Twice now, you’ve nearly kissed her in this house.

Kanaya whirls around and throws a nervous glance behind her, into her dark house, and then turns back to you. You move backwards as she takes a step out and carefully and quietly closes the door behind her.

“ _ Rose _ ,” she half mouths, half whispers, standing pressed up against the door, as if trying to keep any of her family from breaking through it, or as if protecting her homelife from your presence.

You stare at her, eyes once again locked, and you realise that you didn’t think of anything to say. You find yourself at a loss for words, and your lips separate stupidly.

“What is it?” she asks in a hushed whisper, rushing through the question. She looks up as if to check if any of her children are leaning out from their windows, eavesdropping.

You continue to stare at her, and blink before you answer. “I- I don’t know, Kanaya,” and you feel embarrassed to hear how soft your voice sounds.

A moment passes in silence, and then you exhale, relieved, because she lets go of the door and relaxes her shoulders. You know she isn’t going to send you away, despite the risks. You know that she feels what you feel.

“I think I just wanted to talk,” you mumble, and catch her eyes again. The burning sensation of locking eyes with your soulmate really is intoxicating.

“Rose-” she begins, but quiets as she grabs ahold of your hand, seemingly as much to her surprise as to your own. But she doesn’t let go. Instead she lets you settle into her touch, tense your hands against hers to find a comfortable position with her.

You both stare at your interlocked hands, but then she seems to snap out of it, and she looks up at you and breaks the silence: “How are you?”

The question is too big to answer, so instead you take a small step closer to her, knowing that your touch is welcome, and give the question back to her: “How are  _ you _ ?”

She laughs quietly, and looks down at you fondly, but there is pain in her eyes. She lets out a shaky breath. “Not great,” she says meekly, and wipes nonexistent tears from her eyes with her free hand. “Aranea and I,” she begins again, “we aren’t on speaking terms.”

“Oh,” you say simply, and watch as she takes a step closer to you.

“What about you?” she asks, and grabs your other hand. It doesn’t feel like an escalation, it feels like a friend wanting to receive and give comfort to a friend. You squeeze her hand back, affirming her action.

You let a second pass before you respond. “Jane and I are speaking, but I don’t think she’ll ever be happy again.”

To your horror, Kanaya nods.  _ She understands _ . You feel tears burn behind your eyelids, accompanying the hot feeling of her soulmate eyes against yours.

“Nothing will ever be the same,” she whispers as she nods, and now you actually see something sparkle in the corners of her eyes. You swallow, and then you reach up to touch her cheek, and she lets you, so you let your fingers continue up her skin until you can reach to wipe her tears with your thumb.

“Did you ever feel anything for me?” you ask, and your voice trembles from pulling up the memories of the past.

To your disappointment and relief, she shakes her head. “No,” she says, “you were just a student, one of many.”

For some reason, it hurts to hear her say it, but of course you already knew. Instead, you ask her one more question:

“What about now?”

You let go of her hand to lift your other hand up to her face, but this time you let it fall down to the back of her neck. The small hairs on her skin rises as you let your fingernails ghost over her body. You look her deep in the eye as you ask the question.

She folds her lips tightly, and you see her throat flex as she blinks away the remaining tears from her eyes, before she breaks into a pained smile.

Then she nods ‘yes’, and it is the most beautiful and the most soul-crushing thing you have ever seen.

A second later, you have closed the distance. Or maybe it was she who did it, but you don’t care much about the details now. Your hand that is on her neck travels down her spine and your other hand finds rest on the back of her neck in its stead. You taste her lips, and you have to get up onto your toes to deepen the kiss. The faint taste of the remnants of her lipstick, the dinner she must have had with her family earlier that night, the salt of the tears rolling down her cheeks.

Her arm encircles your waist, and she leans over you, desperate for more of your body as she presses you against herself with her strong hand. You let out a contented sound as she slips her knee between your legs, holding your head with her other arm and kissing you like you’ve never been kissed before.

You smile against her lips.

 

Looking back at that moment, you don’t blame any of you two for what happened then, right after your first kiss. In that moment, nothing in the world could have torn your attention away from the woman in your arms.

But there were warning signs. Several, in fact, in rapid succession.

First, there was a door slamming on the top floor, followed by loud footsteps down the stairs, which in turn were followed by the quick clicking of heels.

Then, there was the sound of a woman’s angry sneering, followed by a young boy’s defiant, angry silence.

Last, the last chance, there was the sound of the front door opening, followed by the smattering jingle of a keychain being dropped onto the wooden porch.

You remember everything so clearly, yet it feels like if it were a dream.

One second, you were holding Kanaya Maryam in your arms, feeling her body against yours and your brain and eyes working together in filling your body with hormones like dopamine, testosterone, endorphine.

The next second, she had torn herself away from you, eyes wide in horror as she met her son Dammek’s gaze, mouth opened wide, hair still disheveled and face red.

“Kanaya?” he had asked.

“ _ Dammek _ ,” she had begged.

Behind him, you could see her, Aranea, Kanaya’s wife, and when you met her steel-grey eyes, you knew that you and Kanaya wouldn’t ever see each other again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow.  
> Soo.... is it just me, or is anyone else excited for the big finalé of Part 2 (of 3) aka next chapter? No? Maybe we're all just sad, i dunno. However! I think we *should* be excited because this story is gonna rock and they're gonna be so happy. I promise.
> 
> Anyway, as always: Thank you so much for kudos and comments! (and also if I haven't replied to a comment of yours, it's because I suck and forget and don't know what to say when y'all are being so gosh! darned! nice! thank you.)


	7. Parallel Paths

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everything will be fine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> whoop whoop! a li'l epilogue chapter of sorts for Part 2! there will still be a Part 3, though! of course there will.

Nearly one year has passed.

Originally, Jane didn’t want to come to open-house. She said the other parents would know what had happened, what you had done to your marriage, and what that meant about women who love women. You’d been arguing about it for at least a month, but in the end, you both decided to come.

When you arrive, you feel so relieved that it’s Dirk’s last year at the school. You feel everyone who lives in your happy, little suburbia’s eyes burn into you when you walk in through the doors together with your family.

Tonight, there is no point in pretending that everything is fine, that you love each other, but you will do it anyway.

 

 

* * *

 

 

The school hallways are packed; parents standing awkwardly speaking with teachers, the same parents escaping at last to look at their children’s drawings and paintings that are put up on the walls, children of varying ages running around your feet.

You’ve always kind of liked open-house. But this year it’s different. You want to talk to Xefros’ homeroom teacher, but Aranea is holding you tightly by the arm, pulling you away from any woman that is over the age of twenty. She tells you that you should be focusing on Xefros instead. You tell her of course, but aren’t you focusing on Xefros every other hour of the week? Aranea doesn’t reply.

You also keep seeing her everywhere.

She and her wife are walking with a few feet between them, unlike yourself, who are basically sharing body heat with your own wife. You have your suspicions, though, that it isn’t because their relationship is doing better than Aranea and yours. Not once do you see them speak to one another.

 

* * *

 

 

 

No matter how hard you try, you can’t seem to be able to tear your eyes away from her. And whenever your eyes catch her silhouette in their periphery, you realise that you’ve stopped breathing.

Despite everything that’s happened, despite you being able to see what a beating her marriage has taken in the way that the two women carry themselves around each other, Kanaya Maryam is still moving with such grace. The elegance of her slim, tall figure, seemingly unaware of how she paves a way through the crowd wherever she walks. The curve of her body, the movement of her hips and the way you see that she wants nothing more than to let go of the woman on her arm.

But she keeps her tight grip on Aranea Maryam, and it is driving you mad.

 

* * *

 

 

You are standing by the barbecue when your eyes meet. It’s the first time in several months, but the contact feels so, so familiar. You know it’s because her eyes are the only thing you’ve been able to think about since your lips were torn apart that night outside on your porch.

She doesn’t smile at you, and you don’t smile at her. You simply stand there, with your respective families, wives and children, and bathe in the caress of each other’s eyes. No one stops you, her wife is talking to her son, and Aranea is ordering hotdogs for you and Xefros. No one seems to notice.

In that moment, it feels like there is no way that any of you are going back to your wives tonight.

You see her lower her purple eyes, and a warm feeling fills your stomach as she takes in your body with her eyes. You’ve stopped breathing, and you simply wait for her to finish memorising every curve, every line, every wrinkle and every hair on your body. You know this to be the last time you are certain to ever see each other again.

Then you hear the dad attending the grill say “Here you _go_ , Ma’am,” and your wife answering “Thank you, Jerry,” and you know that this is it. You feel your heart speed up as you realise that this is your last chance to memorise everything about Rose, about Rose _Crocker_ , that makes your knees feel weak and your head feel light.

But her wife is already tugging on her arm, and instead of _seeing_ Rose, the sudden rush of embarrassment makes your warm, green-glowing eyes meet Jane Crocker’s empty, grey ones instead.

You don’t see hatred. Only pain, and the hurt surrender in her gaze telling you that you have kicked away the last brick that made her marriage and life stand at all.

You lower your eyes as Rose turns away, lead away by her son and wife. She doesn’t try to look back.

 

* * *

 

 

You wait until the first family leaves. As you see a woman, a man holding the hand of a toddler, and their teenage daughter leave through the doors, Jane gently squeezes your shoulder as she gets ahold of Dirk’s hand, and you all follow the family out of the school building, out to the parking lot.

None of you speak. You haven’t told Dirk what has happened in the past year, but you can’t be certain about whether the kids at school have heard anything from _their_ parents or not. He hasn’t brought it up, but he also doesn’t talk about his friends or his art project as you walk to your car like he did last year.

The other family is talking loudly; the teenage daughter punches her dad’s arm, the man laughs, and their toddler imitates its father and throws its head back. Your family walks in silence. Jane is holding a binder with Dirk’s work, and he is already picking out his phone and headphones from his back pocket as he crawls in through the car door that his mother has opened for him.

Jane slams the car door shut behind your son, and turns to you. She crosses her arms, and then uncrosses them again.

She opens her mouth to speak—and you can see the glimmer of tears deep in her light grey eyes, and a bright purple light reflecting back at you—but then she closes her mouth again.

Instead of whatever it is that is on her mind, she says: “It was really nice to see everyone from the area again.”

“Yes,” you agree.

“I think Jessica looked to be pregnant again, didn’t you?”

You nod in agreement, even though you didn’t even see Jessica, whoever of the dozens of dark blonde women in high-cut winter jackets she is.

“I’m glad we came,” Jane says and tries to smile. “I’ve had a nice afternoon,” she tells herself but looks directly at you.

“Yes, I as well,” you agree, and shoot your wife an empty smile.

You both stand in silence for a beat, but then she kisses your unresponsive lips, and you both get into the car to drive home to your two-floor house with an apple tree, an unused swing set, and a garden that no one has watered in weeks.

Everything will be fine, like it always is.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oof.  
> so! SUCH big thanks to everyone who's stuck with me thus far! i really really like this story, and i'm excited for Part 3! i haven't planned it 100% yet (just have the concept rn), but if you want to *finally* get something other than angst (aka lesbian fluff aww yeaah), subscribe to the series that this belongs to ("Forbidden"), and you'll get pinged when i start the next Part of this story!  
> again, thanks y'all. your kudos and comments mean the world (even if i haven't replied to 'em lately...), for real.


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